The League of Tana Tea Drinkers

Our mission is to acknowledge, foster, and support thoughtful, articulate, and creative blogs built on an appreciation of the horror and sci-horror genres.

Horror bloggers are a unique group of devoted fans and professionals, from all walks of life, who keep the genre, in all its permutations and media outlets, alive and kicking. Often spending long hours to keep their blogs informative and fun, horror bloggers share their unique mix of personality, culture and knowledge freely to fans of a genre difficult to describe, and fun to fear.

We honor exemplary horror blogs with our own special insignia: one that signifies the heights to which we aspire, and the code of excellence we follow to promote horror in all its wonderfully frightening forms, from classic to contemporary, from philosophical to schlockical.

The League of Tana Tea Drinkers are bloggers who toil away the extra midnight hour to present the best in horror blogging to reach the heights of horrifying excellence. We know what rapture it is to sip tana tea in the full moon light, and feel the thrill of walking the dark passageways in cinema and literature, searching for the unusual, the terrifying, and the monstrous. For the fun of it.

Keep watching the skies, and reading the horror. LOTT D is coming for you!

--jmcozzoli, Zombos' Closet of Horror

August 25, 2009

Pick a Post 11

Beware! Once again, the archives have been unburied, and the hideous horrors unleashed! For your entertainment and edification pleasure, of course. Members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers dig six feet deep to find their past misdeeds...and reveal them to you, one favorite and notable post at a time!

Thirst is the kind of film I don’t want to say anything about. I just want topoint it out, say, “Yep, this is the one”, and move on until more people have an opportunity to see it. It’s the first time all year long at a theater that I’ve felt at the mercy of a filmmaker.

Sala's comics are typically composed of wild, off-kilter riffs on pulpy, hardboiled, and Gothic horror tropes. Delphine is billed as a modern reimagining of Snow White (and, I'd add, Sleeping Beauty) from the prince's point of view, but that's a bit misleading if anyone comes to it expecting Sala to give the fairy tale source material his usual high-spirited treatment. He sets his pop-cultural influences aside this time to lead us down a grimmer path.

Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat looks on the inhumanity in District 9 with horror:

But when you see just how bad things get, in a sequence that's like some nightmare cross between Hostel, Brazil, Starship Troopers, and (at least to me--it's something in Wikus's voice) the baseball bat scene in Casino...the audience on 34th St. gasped in horror, the couple in front of me clung to each other, and I literally fought back tears. Even though you've still got most of the movie to go before you reach the final shootouts, I think that sequence is where my patience with the explosions and derring-do at the end was earned.

If you're not watching True Blood by now, you're missing out.Either you don't have HBO (get it, you cheap sumbitch!), you're sick of the relentless vampire trend, or you have an odd aversion to anything that is virally popular right now. In any case, here are ten reasons to jump on the bandwagon and watch this insanely addictive, well-casted, campy vamp-fest.

in truth, those behind the films we see, even those of graphic horror films, usually have the audience’s best interests at heart. they want you to enjoy their movie. like the creators of a rollercoaster, horror directors may want to make a scary ride… but not one so scary that it actually injures or traumatizes. but what if this were not true?

In some ways 1958’s She Demons is like one of those exploitation-styled stories that would appear in the sweaty men’s action magazines of the sixties, where overly viral white guys rescued, or tried to anyway, captive white girls from the clutches of Nazis, Imperial Japanese soldiers, commies, pirates or wild animals of various sorts. The story is one of the most outlandish ideas ever and so it lands a place here at the Uranium Café.

Chilling, complex, and artfully told, The Body Snatcher is the kind of shivery cautionary tale relayed in front of fireplaces on coldwinter nights. Each character makes their own contributions to the tangled web of human failures, and we can't help but recoil in both fear and recognition. That kind of horror stays with you, lingers at the back of your brain. You'll never get rid of it, Toddy... Never.

Cinema Suicide chats it up with the perfect B-movie guest, Andrew W.K.:

Party rocker/motivational speaker, Andrew WK takes time to explain his thoughts on the topic of the b-movie.

Though the story seems pretty linear and frail, Messerer keeps it interesting through his clever depictions of the characters and their quirky personalities. A dinner scene involving the whole family comes to mind from the beginning of the movie; it's long and drawn out, andhas nothing to do with vampires, but it plants the seed in the audience's mind of who the characters are, and it gets us identifying with them.